"Terribly high CPU usage, the MacBook gets really hot" - a fanless MacBook
Air on a 144Hz screen. Measured on that machine with headed engines
(process CPU plus the per-process GPU time macOS keeps): an idle Aero
library cost LibreWolf ~110% CPU and ~230ms/s of GPU, the study feed ~130%,
Chromium up to ~57% CPU and ~350ms/s of GPU, Safari ~220-250ms/s of
WindowServer GPU. Priced one by one:
- the gradient mask on .ice-floats re-rendered the animated layer offscreen
on every frame (~75 points of Gecko CPU). The floats now rise through a
plain rectangular band clear of the header, the bottom chrome and the
rail, and fade in and out inside it, so the clip never cuts a visible one;
- the overlay grain forced a backdrop readback per frame for a texture that
measured a mean <=0.11/255 difference: removed;
- the invisible blob drift made every frame a full-screen redraw: the blobs
are painted once;
- static glass (answer tiles, feedback panel, chips, inputs, dropzones,
lists, segmented controls, Aero hint chips) re-blurred the moving scene
every frame: only floating glass blurs now, and Aero's baked chat chrome
drops a live blur that never showed under the bake;
- the scene also parks while the window has no focus and under any dialog
or sheet scrim (.scene-pause); the loading icon is a compositor-run CSS
animation instead of a framer-motion main-thread loop.
After, focused and animating: LibreWolf library 109% -> 33% CPU, study
134% -> 34%, chat 130% -> 42%; Chromium GPU 2.5-4.4x lower with 7-22 points
less CPU; Safari's WindowServer GPU -20-26% in Aero, about half in dark.
Unfocused or under a sheet: nothing. bubbles-test sweeps every float through
41 phases against the band and pins the parking and the cost contract;
tests/heat-probe.mjs (macOS) repeats the measurement; the suites find
Playwright's Chromium on macOS.
All 15 suites pass, lint clean, the contrast scan lost a finding. Version
0.6.7, SW v89.
Co-authored-by: Cursor <cursoragent@cursor.com>
The header and composer were full-bleed bands (flush to the top/right/bottom
viewport edges, composer corners off-screen) next to a rail that floats with a
12px margin. The new --layout-gutter (12px) spaces the rail, header, empty-state
card and composer identically on every side; --radius-panel/-control/-chip
(-pill) replace the ad-hoc radii across the shared classes, so every panel is
rounded on all four corners and shared controls match in every theme. The
desktop-only ::after hairlines and the left-corner-only radius are gone.
Aero: the rail and the chat chrome (answers included) share one even recipe -
the wallpaper extra-blurred into a hue-free wash (background-glass.webp) under a
uniform ~50% white veil and a whisper of gloss. Measured within ~10 RGB units
across the rail top->bottom and the card/composer left->right; the blue->green
smear and the teal composer are gone. The composer's field is a clean even tile
with no wallpaper gradient inside it.
Chat fixes: send is a filled primary tile shaped exactly like attach (dimmed
while the input is empty), suggestion/context chips use the shared .chip token
(40/44px target, visible rim, full-contrast text, raw model id in the tooltip),
the AI note reads at 12px --text-muted (.ai-disclaimer), the selected sidebar
row carries the accent border + accent icon, the theme toggle is back in Aero
(the moon flips to Dark; Settings brings Aero back), and the empty state is
centered exactly between header and composer.
Outside CSS: the wallpaper's top-left HUD-circle decoration (it peeked through
the 12px gutters on wide windows) was healed out of background.webp and
background-blur.webp; the orbs/bubbles ride one masked .ice-floats layer that
fades them under the chrome bands and the rail strip, so none is sliced by a
panel edge (still parked under reduced motion).
Version 0.6.0, SW -> freezmo-v82. Tests: chat suite pins the new geometry (12px
gutter, 24px corners, even wash on all four panels, send-vs-attach shape,
chips/input radii); mobile pins the phone chrome and the Aero toggle; bubbles
pins the floats layer + its reduced-motion opt-out.
- Orbs rise from below the bottom edge to above the top edge, each with
its own 36-68s pass (slower on phones), a negative delay (scene already
populated on load), own horizontal position, a gentle sway and a slight
scale drift; opacity fades in/out at the edges so the loop never pops.
- Only transform + opacity animate, each orb on its own composited layer
(will-change: transform); no filter/backdrop-filter, nothing animates
size/offsets/shadow. The glacier blobs are untouched.
- Opacity lowered ~38% in both themes: 0.55->0.34 light, 0.8->0.5 dark,
phone overrides 0.32->0.2 / 0.42->0.26.
- prefers-reduced-motion: rise removed, orbs return to the old static
placements (a paused-from-start CSS animation is not applied in Chrome
and would park them below the fold); tab hidden: a visibility listener
parks the whole scene (.ice-paused), blob drift included.
- Measured with a CDP perf trace on a 4x throttled phone profile: p95
33.4ms, 0 frames over 34ms, no long tasks - identical to the pre-change
baseline; ~0.6% extra main-thread CPU. Desktop stays compositor-bound
from the pre-existing blob drift, as before. tests/bubble-perf.mjs
keeps it repeatable.
- New bubbles suite (34 checks) in the repo harness; the axe contrast
matrix is now 16 runs (360/390/1280 x dark/light x EN/CS) and passes.
- SW cache -> freezmo-v31; README decision 46.
Full suite: 11/11 suites, 424 checks.
